URL shortening is among the convenient things that have silently changed our browsing habits. Most people click shortened links without even thinking, although such URLs can misdirect us and even lead to malware sites. And now a new study has confirmed what some of us have been suspecting all along, that URL shorteners slow down the web. When you think of it, such a notion makes a lot of sense.

Each time you click a short URL, you’re taken to a server that looks up a target URL in its database and redirects you to it. Because most URL shorteners are ran by startups that lack the optimal infrastructure, redirecting often takes longer than necessary, eating up users’ precious time. In addition to that, when a URL shortening service goes offline the resulting link won’t work. A Dutch startup Watchmouse has been tracking response times of fourteen URL shorteners over a one-month period. The study has confirmed that most URL shorteners add up a considerable delay to your browsing.

As you can see from the below chart, the leading URL shortening services slow down the page loading time by about one second. Facebook’s URL shortener, currently in beta, is by far the worst, adding up over two second to the page loading time while Google’s goo.gl and youtu.be cut that down to about half a second. Facebook has begun testing its own URL shortening service last December. The service takes you regular facebook.com/username link and creates a shorter fb.me/username representation that saves seven characters.

Like other URL shorteneres, fb.me also trims down the more characters the longer a target link is. Besides user profiles, beta testers say that fb.me works with other Facebook-related URLs, like galleries, pages, events, etc. Google also launched its own goo.gl shortener last December. Unlike public URL shortening services like bit.ly, Facebook’s fb.me, Amazon’s amzn.com, and Google’s goo.gl and youtu.be all work internally and are not designed to shorten any web URL.